In June 1933, William Hamm Jr. , head of the Hamm’s Brewing Company, stepped out of his office in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was seized on the street by armed men in full view of witnesses. The kidnappers belonged to the Barker-Karpis gang, one of the most brutal criminal outfits of the era, known for armed robberies and the abduction of wealthy businessmen.
They demanded $100,000, a staggering sum during the Great Depression, when most Americans struggled to survive on a few dollars a week. The family paid without contacting police, following the kidnappers’ instructions to the letter. Four days later, Hamm was released unharmed in a suburb of St. Paul.
The kidnapping became national news and symbolized the criminal violence sweeping the Midwest. The FBI eventually captured several gang members, including key organizers, who received long prison sentences. For the Hamm family, the ordeal was a brutal reminder that their success had made them targets. Yet it did not drive them from the business.
On the contrary, the decades that followed became the most ambitious in the company’s history. That business had begun in 1856, long before the kidnapping, with an unpaid debt. Theodore Hamm, a German immigrant and former butcher who had become a saloon owner in St. Paul, lent money to a local brewer named Andrew Keller.
Keller wanted to expand his small brewery, built directly above artesian springs in the Swedish Hollow area, which provided the pure water used for the beer. The brewery itself served as collateral. But Keller’s business failed. Expenses regularly exceeded revenue, and by 1864 he could not repay the loan despite years of selling equipment and borrowing from acquaintances to delay the inevitable.
Hamm had never brewed beer and had no connection to the trade, but he took possession of the business in settlement of the debt and renamed it Theo Hamm’s Excelsior Brewery. The company’s history is formally counted from 1865. Hamm hired an experienced brewer and immersed himself in the craft, learning everything from purchasing hops to controlling the quality of the finished drink, consulting with brewers who had decades of practice. His persistence paid off.
By the 1880s, Hamm’s brewery had become the second largest in Minnesota, overtaking dozens of competitors with far longer histories and deeper European brewing traditions. Theodore Hamm died in 1903 at the age of 78, leaving behind one of Minnesota’s largest enterprises, providing jobs for hundreds of families. Management passed to his son William, and then to his grandson William Hamm Jr. , keeping the business entirely in family hands without outside investors or publicly traded shares.
The first major test came in 1920 with Prohibition, which made the production of alcohol illegal for more than a dozen years. Most of Hamm’s competitors closed for good. The family shifted its facilities to non-alcoholic beverages, malt syrup, mineral water, and canned goods, keeping the business alive through all thirteen years of the ban, though with far more modest turnover. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the Hamm family already had the infrastructure for rapid growth.
They immediately began buying up breweries across the country, taking advantage of competitors that had never recovered from the long shutdown. But that same year brought the kidnapping of William Hamm Jr. , the most personal threat the family had ever faced. Even so, they held on.
In 1951, William Fig Jr. became president of the company. Under his leadership, Hamm’s entered its most aggressive period of growth. The company opened breweries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore, and in 1963 acquired the Gulf Brewing Company in Houston, originally founded in 1933 by Howard Hughes himself.
By the mid-1950s, Hamm’s had officially become the fifth largest beer producer in the entire country. The brand also launched one of the most recognizable advertising campaigns in beer industry history, featuring a cartoon bear and a jingle about the land of sky blue waters, making the brand famous far beyond Minnesota. Then, at the very peak of its success, on the symbolic 100th anniversary of Theodore Hamm taking over the brewery, the family made a decision that many business historians still call one of the most mysterious in the history of regional American brands. In 1965, the Hamm family sold the company to Heublein, a Connecticut giant specializing in alcohol and food products with dozens of brands in its portfolio.
The family never publicly explained the exact reasons in detail. Based on indirect evidence and recollections of contemporaries, it appears to have been a combination of factors: aggressive national expansion required enormous investment that was increasingly difficult to finance entirely from family funds; competition with national giants like Budweiser and Miller was intensifying every year; and there was no new generation ready to take over the business with the same energy. From a purely financial standpoint, the decision looked reasonable and even far-sighted. But it permanently stripped the company of the personal family management that had distinguished it for an entire century.
The answer to what follows when a family business built by three generations falls into the hands of a corporation came quickly. In 1967, just two years after the sale, a fire completely destroyed the Houston brewery. The new owner decided not to rebuild it. In the early 1970s, the breweries in Los Angeles and San Francisco were closed, the very infrastructure the family had spent years building and adapting to different regional water conditions and climates.
Then began a carousel of resales. In 1975, Heublein sold Hamm’s to Olympia Brewing. In 1983, Olympia was bought by Pabst, and Hamm’s went with it, no longer a priority asset among many competing brands. A year later, as part of a complex asset exchange, the historic brewery building in St.
Paul ended up in the hands of Stroh’s, which brewed its own beer there instead of Hamm’s. In 1997, 132 years after Theodore Hamm first walked into that building knowing nothing about brewing, the historic brewery closed for good. For 103 years, one family had held the business through wars, economic crises, and the kidnapping of its own head. After the sale, the brand passed through four different owners in less than thirty years, losing more and more of its connection to its own past with every deal.
Today, the rights to the Hamm’s brand belong to Molson Coors, which still produces beer under the name, now as an inexpensive niche brand aimed at nostalgic fans who call themselves Hampions and gather online around their shared love for a cheap but familiar beer linked to generations of Sunday backyard barbecues. The historic brewery building in St. Paul still stands, but production ended there long ago. It is now more of an architectural landmark than an operating factory.
The cartoon bear and the jingle about sky blue waters outlived the Hamm family, the original brewery, and all four changes of corporate ownership. People who recognize the bear on a can today usually have no idea about the century-long family history behind it, the kidnapping of the owner by the Barker-Karpis gang, or the fact that the company has long had nothing to do with the family or the brewery built above the artesian springs. The brand survived as a trademark, an image on a can, rather than as the living family business it had been for a century.
What remains from three generations of effort is a recognizable logo and a melody from an old television commercial, a tune that sounds completely different to those who know the full story.